There are many schools of thought to which an American philosopher may belong, but there is still only one school of American philosophy. The last few Marxists may look to Frederic Jameson to lead them, while the last few followers of Heidegger may look to such writers as John Caputo. Richard Rorty, with his strange brew of old-fashioned American pragmatism and postmodern French deconstruction, has his share of followers, as does Alasdair MacIntyre with his recent work on Thomas Aquinas. Nussbaum, Kripke, Cavell, Sokolowski, Irwin, and McInerney––these are all names to conjure with in the various worlds of contemporary philosophical thought. But far above the jarring sects, there stand the true heirs of William James and John Dewey: the group of thinkers who practice that mixture of empiricism, utilitarianism, pragmatism, and liberal social theory which remains the one distinctively American school of philosophy. Ronald Dworkin, now Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford, and Thomas Nagel of New York University, together with Robert Nozick and John Rawls of Harvard, form the core. And when Harvard’s Thomas Scanlon and MIT’s Judith Jarvis Thomson are added in, the roster of America’s true philosophical establishment is nearly complete.
If for no other reason than the fact that these six thinkers are among the brightest lights of American philosophy, it is worth notice that they joined last fall to file an amicus brief in the two assisted-suicide cases pending before the Supreme Court: Washington v. Gluckberg, appealed from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Vacco v. Quill, appealed from the Second Circuit. As Dworkin himself observes in the new introduction he wrote for the brief’s publication in the March 27, 1997 issue of the New York Review of Books, there seems to be no other occasion on which “a group has intervened in Supreme Court litigation solely as general moral philosophers.” The sheer existence of a brief signed with these names proclaims that the opinion of America’s most elevated intellectuals is exactly where one thought it would be: solidly in favor of declaring a constitutionally protected right to doctor-assisted suicide.
